German MPP specialist Candler Schiffahrt has bolstered its orderbook at China’s Jiangxi New Jiangzhou Shipbuilding Heavy Industry in a deal for two additional vessels.
The Bremen-based company has contracted the 12,000 dwt brace for an undisclosed price tag following a deal for four newbuildings last March.
Shipbuilding sources said the latest deal covers optional units the company secured through the initial order.
The 140 m long vessels have been developed by Shanghai Merchant Ship Design & Research Institute (SDARI) to meet the EEDI Phase 3 and the IMO Tier III requirements for NOx emissions.
Candler currently operates four MPPs under its own management and several chartered-in ships.
The yard in Jiangxi, formerly known as Jiangzhou Union Shipbuilding, had also recently secured more orders from Dutch owner Mercurius Shipping for stainless steel chemical tankers.
Chinese boxship player SITC International Holdings has exercised options at Huanghai Shipbuilding for two additional 1,800 teu vessels.
The Hong Kong-listed shipowner is paying nearly $58m to lift the series at the compatriot yard to eight, with deliveries for the latest pair scheduled by October and December of 2027.
SITC signed a shipbuilding contract with Huanghai in June last year for four firm and six optional 1,800 teu newbuilds, meaning it has two more slots booked for potential future fleet expansion.
According to Alphaliner, the intra-Asia carrier ranks 14th in the global container shipping enterprises with a capacity of 181,811 teu spread across 116 vessels, including 102 self-owned.
Norwegian offshore wind contractor Havfram has landed another construction project in Europe.
The work, anticipated to last about one year, will be executed in 2029, utilising one of the company’s newbuild installation vessels, slated for delivery in the second half of 2025, Havfram said without disclosing further details.
This marks the company’s eighth contract for transport and installation support of turbines for large-scale offshore wind projects in Europe between 2026 and 2030.
Havfram is currently building a fleet of what it describes as one of the world’s most advanced offshore wind turbine installation vessels (WTIVs) at CIMC Raffles in China. The first WTIV is scheduled for delivery in August 2025, with the second newbuild joining the fleet in late Q4 2025.
Last October, the company inked a reservation agreement with an undisclosed client for one of its newbuilds with the expected start-up in the first quarter of 2029, after securing two offshore wind contracts in Germany from Luxcara and a partnership between Vattenfall and BASF, with utilisation secured for the newbuilds in 2027 and 2028.
Norwegian offshore vessel owner Solstad Maritime has secured more work for its fleet with three vessels fixed to undisclosed clients.
The company, which is expected to float on the Oslo Stock Exchange in the second quarter of this year, has landed a 135-day contract for the 2014-built construction support vessel (CSV) Normand Jarstein in West Africa, starting in March this year.
The deal with unspecified extension options attached covers subsea support services together with Omega Subsea, in which Solstad Maritime’s shareholder Solstad Offshore has close to a 36% stake.
Meanwhile, the 2009-built CSV Normand Australis has been contracted for up to 290 days for a renewable energy project in Taiwan. The contract starts in February, with firm fixture lasting 200 days.
Lastly, the 2009-built anchor handling tug supply unit Normand Scorpion has been hired for rig support work in Australia. The contract is for 78 days from January, with an option secured for an additional 42 days.
Earlier in January, Solstad also fixed its 2014-built CSV Normand Frontier until the end of 2027. The value of the contracts secured this month has not been revealed.
ENB Pub Note: While President Trump’s remarks are around coal, he says, “Nothing can destroy coal. Not the weather, not a bomb. It’s a great backup.” The topic around the President’s policies and comments sheds light on the fact that low-cost energy is critical for economic success. Germany is finding out the hard way that regimes change when economies fail. And the Green Energy policies have caused the deindustrialization in Germany and much of the EU. The UK, New York, and California are not far behind.
In classic Trump fashion, the President declared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, “Nothing can destroy coal. Not the weather, not a bomb. It’s a great backup.”
These words, delivered with signature bravado, sent a warm glow through U.S. coal producers—along with a noticeable bump in their stock prices. Peabody Energy Corp. surged over 7%, Core Natural Resources Inc. climbed nearly 3%, and the coal subsector index shot up by over 4%.
For an industry that’s been left out in the cold in recent years, the moment was nothing short of a resurrection.
Trump’s stance on coal isn’t new, but let’s be honest, it’s been sitting in the back seat as oil and gas steal the energy spotlight. Yet, this fresh endorsement has reminded not just Davos but the world that coal isn’t just yesterday’s energy—at least not in Trump’s America. In his first-day-in-office executive order, President Trump declared a national energy emergency, tearing down regulatory barriers and throwing a lifeline to fossil fuels.
Oil and gas are front and center, but coal isn’t getting overlooked entirely, securing the equivalent of a wink and a “we’ve got your back.”
The President’s message, delivered by video at Davos, is this: dominance is the goal, and no stone—or coal seam—will be left unturned. Trump’s sweeping policies aim to make U.S. energy production not just robust but untouchable. Federal lands and waters are open for exploration, infrastructure projects will be fast-tracked, and bureaucratic red tape will be shredded with glee.
Critics may clutch their pearls over coal’s carbon footprint, but Trump isn’t sweating it. To him, “clean coal” is “very strong as a backup.”
With the administration’s renewed focus on domestic energy security, coal won’t be going quietly into that good night. In a world where market share is the name of the game, the U.S. is making its energy play—and coal is still on the team.
Bogota must accept the “criminals they forced into the United States,” the US president has said
US President Donald Trump has said that he will impose emergency tariffs on Colombia and sanction its officials after Colombian President Gustavo Petro refused to allow American planes carrying deported illegal immigrants to land in the country.
“I was just informed that two repatriation flights from the United States, with a large number of Illegal Criminals, were not allowed to land in Colombia,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social app on Sunday, adding that he has directed his administration to take “urgent and decisive retaliatory measures.”
Trump went on to explain that he will place a 25% emergency tariff on all Colombian goods entering the US, which will be doubled in a week. The US is Colombia’s largest trading partner, with around $12 billion worth of Colombian goods entering the US every year.
Trump said that all Colombian government officials along with their “allies and supporters” would have their visas revoked and be subject to a travel ban, while visa sanctions would be applied to all members of Petro’s left-wing Human Colombia party and their families.
Colombian visitors to the US will be subject to enhanced inspections by Customs and Border Protection agents, he continued, adding that financial sanctions will also be imposed on Bogota.
“These measures are just the beginning,” he concluded. “We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States!”
Earlier on Sunday, Petro said that he would not allow any deportation flights to land in Colombia until the US guarantees the “dignified treatment” of deported migrants. Petro did not state what he meant by “dignified treatment.”
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been carrying out daily raids across the US since Trump took office on Monday, with 421 people detained for removal on Saturday alone, according to the agency. Cities targeted included Boston, New York, Newark, and San Francisco, and agents focused on arresting immigrants who had committed subsequent crimes after entering the US illegally, ICE said.
In a statement on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “deportation flights have begun.” Two military aircraft carried 160 people to Guatemala that day, while another three flights to Guatemala and four flights to Mexico took off on Friday.
It is unclear how many Colombian nationals are currently awaiting deportation.
In a sweeping move that halts billions in spending, President Trump’s administration has frozen the Department of Energy’s (DOE) activities pending a comprehensive review of its alignment with his priorities. According to a memo from acting Energy Secretary Ingrid Kolb, the freeze affects grants, loans, procurement, studies, and even personnel decisions, effectively bringing the agency’s $50 billion budget to a standstill.
Beyond bureaucratic tinkering, the halt is a direct shot at dismantling Biden-era climate policies. The DOE’s Loan Programs Office, holding $41.2 billion in conditional commitments to energy technology companies, now finds its purse strings tightly cinched. Other critical missions, like nuclear waste cleanup and maintenance of emergency crude reserves, are similarly on pause.
The order mirrors an earlier Trump directive freezing funds tied to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and a bipartisan infrastructure law, both of which allocated billions for clean energy initiatives. Trump, who has championed fossil fuels as a cornerstone of his energy policy, has made it clear that climate-focused spending is no longer a federal priority.
The Interior Department issued a similar freeze on wind and solar project leases on federal lands and waters.
While the Trump administration’s goal is to “unleash” American energy by cutting red tape, critics argue that freezing investments in innovative technologies jeopardizes long-term energy security. For now, the DOE and the clean energy sector are left in limbo pending the results of a review that could redefine the nation’s energy landscape.
While critics—including US oil companies—have highlighted Trump’s seemingly contradictory approach to oil markets: pressuring OPEC to lower global oil prices while promoting a “drill, baby, drill” mantra domestically, his regulatory rollbacks and anti-renewable agenda appear to be a bone tossed to U.S. oil companies, clearing the way for fossil fuel development and potentially boosting their bottom lines, even as global oil dynamics remain a tug-of-war.
The Trump administration’s energy strategy is trying to walk a fine line between prioritizing American energy independence and responding to market realities.
Nuclear energy stocks are experiencing a resurgence due to increased demand from AI and data centers.
The Trump administration’s $500 billion AI infrastructure venture further boosted nuclear stocks.
Nuclear power is seen as a solution to meet the growing energy demands of AI and data centers while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Over the past couple of years, the nuclear energy sector has enjoyed a renaissance in the U.S. and many western countries thanks to the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine, high power demand and nuclear’s status as a low-carbon energy source. Uranium demand has soared thanks to a series of policy “U-turns” with governments from Japan to Germany revising plans to phase out nuclear power. Uranium spot prices hit an all-time high of $81.32 per pound in February, double the level 12 months prior. According to the World Nuclear Association, demand from reactors is expected to climb 28% by 2030, and nearly double by 2040. Not surprisingly, the sector’s popular benchmark, VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF (NYSEARCA:NLR), recently hit an all-time high.
However, last month, nuclear energy stocks started pulling back sharply, mostly because the sector was seriously overheating. One of the biggest losers was NuScale Power Corp. (NYSE:SMR), with the stock crashing nearly 30% in a matter of weeks. The selloff kicked off after the company disclosed an agreement with several brokerage firms in which the company may offer and sell from time to time as much as $200M in common stock. NuScale says proceeds from the sale will be used for general corporate purposes, including operating expenses, capital expenditures, R&D costs and working capital. NuScale is a developer of modular light water reactor nuclear power plants. Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are advanced nuclear reactors with power capacities that range from 50-300 MW(e) per unit, compared to 700+ MW(e) per unit for traditional nuclear power reactors.
Thankfully, nuclear stocks are on fire again after President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a $500 billion joint venture with Oracle Corp. (NYSE:ORCL), OpenAI, and SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBY) to build AI infrastructure in the U.S. The companies have pledged to commit $100 billion to start, and as much as $500 billion over the next four years toward the initiative, with Trump calling it “largest AI infrastructure project in history.” OpenAI, ChatGPT maker, said it expects the project, called Stargate, to help support American leadership in AI, and that it could create “hundreds of thousands” of jobs in the U.S. Other tech giants including Nvidia Corp.(NASDAQ:NVDA) Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)) and Arm Holdings (NASDAQ:ARM) are also expected to be technology partners in the project.
NuScale stock has rocketed 1,175% over the past 12 months; Oklo Inc. (NYSE:OKLO), which is backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has surged 299%, Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST) has soared 386% while Centrus Energy (NYSE:LEU) has jumped 73% over the timeframe.
Meanwhile, shares of Nano Nuclear Energy (NASDAQ:NNE) have jumped 1,017% since its May 2024 IPO. The shares made further gains on Thursday after the company was awarded patents related to its designs for a modular transportable nuclear generator. Nano Nuclear is developing ZEUS, a solid core battery reactor, and ODIN, a low-pressure salt coolant reactor.
Yet another big mover is Baltimore, Maryland-based Constellation Energy Corporation (NASDAQ:CEG), a power utility that sells natural gas, energy-related products, and sustainable solutions. CEG shares have soared 200% over the past 52 weeks. The company owns approximately 33,094 megawatts of generating capacity consisting of nuclear, wind, solar, natural gas, and hydroelectric assets.
Long-Term Bullish
The big nuclear rally kicked off last year after NuScale signed an agreement with Standard Power to supply the data center provider with SMRs. Standard Power–a developer of modular data centers–will use NuScale Power’s power solutions at two separate sites, where up to 12 SMRs (at each site) would be used to provide power for new data centers. Suddenly, the market took note of SMRs as a viable solution for data centers struggling to keep up with surging power demands by artificial intelligence (AI) computing. The International Energy Agency has projected that global data center electricity consumption will jump from 460 terawatt-hours in 2022 to 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026.
The long-term outlook for the nuclear sector remains bullish, with nuclear power expected to meet surging AI demand and lower greenhouse gas emissions. According to Goldman Sachs, escalating electricity needs from running AI data centers will generate downstream investment opportunities that will benefit utilities, renewable energy generation, and industrial sectors. The investment bank has forecast that data center power demand will grow at 15% compound annual growth rate from 2023-2030, with data centers consuming 8% of total U.S. electricity output at the end of the forecast period compared to ~3% currently. Analysts estimate that ~47 GW of additional power generation capacity will be required to meet the growth in U.S. data center power demand by 2030.
Last year, a total of 34 countries, including the U.S., pledged to increasingly deploy nuclear power to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) report Electricity 2024, nuclear power generation is forecast to reach an all-time high globally in 2025, exceeding the previous record set in 2021 as new reactors begin commercial operations in multiple markets, including China, India, South Korea, and Europe; output from France climbs and several plants in Japan are restarted.
President Donald Trump announced the $500 billion AI project, Stargate, earlier this week.
Stargate’s first data center is under construction in Abilene, Texas, said Oracle CTO Larry Ellison.
Public filings for an Abilene development matching Ellison’s description shed some light on costs.
Construction on what appears to be two buildings on Stargate’s first data center campus, now underway in Texas, is expected to be complete by the end of the year and cost an estimated $1.1 billion, according to public filings.
President Donald Trump announced the formation of Stargate, a joint venture between Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank, at a White House press conference on Tuesday. He pledged to spend $500 billion building AI data centers in the US.
Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison, who joined Trump, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at the briefing, said the first Stargate data centers are currently being built in Abilene, Texas.
“We’ve been working with OpenAI for a while and Masa for a while. The data centers are actually under construction — the first of them are under construction in Texas,” said Ellison. “Each building is a half million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”
Little else has been revealed about Stargate. Registration forms filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for a data center development in Abilene matching Ellison’s description of Stargate give some insight into the cost of building the data centers.
The development is registered with the TDLR under the name “Project Ludicrous,” located at an address attached to the Lancium Clean Campus — a 1,000-acre site in Abilene owned by energy tech company Lancium. The owner of Project Ludicrous is listed as Abilene DC 1 LLC, an affiliate of data center development startup Crusoe. According to the Texas state comptroller’s records, Oracle is the occupant of the data center owned by Abilene DC 1, LLC, located at the Lancium Clean Campus in Abilene. A Texas-based Oracle employee is also listed as the tenant contact for Project Ludicrous in the TDLR filings.
Between July and December 2024, agents for Project Ludicrous filed four different TDLR filings for two buildings.
Construction on the first building, a 482,000-square-foot one-story “data hall” estimated to cost $292 million, began in June 2024 and is scheduled to be completed by May 30, 2025. The estimate also includes plans for a guard house, fire pump building, and mechanical and electrical enclosures. A second filing for the building, made in September, indicates that tenant improvements costing $140 million began in December and are expected to be completed by September 15, 2025.
A second building registered under Project Ludicrous, a 484,960-square-foot “1-story data center” with a cost estimate of $292 million, went under construction in September and is expected to be completed in one year, the filings said. Tenant improvements, expected to begin in March and be completed by December 24, are estimated at $384 million.
The San Antonio Express-News previously reported on these filings.
Lancium, the landowner, first struck a development deal with the city of Abilene in 2021 for what it calls the Lancium Clean Campus. The site was initially meant to power bitcoin mines with renewable energy generation, although that never came to fruition.
In November, Crusoe announced plans for a $3.4 billion data center development on the Lancium Clean Campus and said it had already fully leased the space to a “Fortune 100 hyperscale tenant,” with occupancy expected to begin in the first half of 2025.
The Information first reported Oracle’s plans to lease a data center site in Texas from Crusoe, intending to eventually rent servers to OpenAI.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said that the Stargate “buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.”
“Lancium is excited to be building its Lancium Clean Campus in Abilene, Texas, in partnership with Crusoe and the Development Corporation of Abilene (DCOA) and to be at the forefront of the growth of the AI infrastructure industry in the US,” a spokesperson for Lancium wrote in response to a request for comment from Business Insider. The spokesperson said the company could not “provide any new commentary about Abilene or any of our other Clean Campuses.”
Oracle, OpenAI, and Crusoe did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Source: Contact Ellen Thomas via the secure messaging app Signal at +1-929-524-6964.
ENB Pub Note: The New York legislators and Gov Hochul are not looking at things in a “what is best for my constituents” type of model. This article points out that this will trigger a mass exodus, or in my opinion, speed up the exodus of businesses and tax-paying consumers leaving New York. We just have to watch what is happening in real-time in the EU, UK, Germany, and California to see that New York will be failing with the same green policies.
Albany’s rainmakers have found a new way to shower cash into the state’s dwindling coffers.
The day after Christmas, Gov. Hochul signed Bill S2129A into law, deputizing the Department of Environmental Conservation to fine fossil fuel companies billions of dollars for past greenhouse gas emissions.
The money will go into a Climate Change Slush — er, “superfund” that will be used, ostensibly, to prepare for and manage adverse weather events, like floods.
Sponsored by five Senate Democrats — Liz Krueger (28th Senate District) Joe Addabbo (15th), Neil Breslin (46th), Jabari Brisport (25th), and Samra Brouk (55th) — and following on the heels of a law Vermont passed last year, the Climate Change Superfund will retroactively levy a fee on firms that “engaged in the trade or business of extracting fossil fuel or refining crude oil” during a “covered period” from Jan. 1, 2000 to Dec. 31, 2018; that exceeded 1 billion metric tons of emissions; and that sold their products into the Empire State — big foreign producers like China National Petroleum Company and Rosneft needn’t worry.
The scheme sets a target of $75 billion to be collected from such firms over a 25-year period. From that (arbitrary) dollar starting point the scheme will portion a “cost recovery demand” to the big American energy players that constitute the “responsible parties” based on their historic emissions tallies. Where will the money go?
As Manhattan Institute legal fellow and cities director John Ketcham has pointed out, the fund will dole out cash to well-connected trade unions working on infrastructure projects, “disadvantaged” communities, and special interest groups under a system of “poorly defined preferentialism.”
The new scheme styles itself in the fashion of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s 1980 superfund law, but bears little resemblance to that law in reality.
The EPA superfund holds polluters liable for the direct environmental damage they have caused by releasing hazardous waste — harms that are specified, local, particular, and attributable.
Big oil companies could be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars for past fossil fuel pollution.Getty Images
The climate superfund idea simply slaps retroactive fees onto a group of companies that sold products the state no longer views favorably. While in aggregate global fossil fuel use has amplified the greenhouse effect, these companies have emitted just a sliver of the world’s total.
The state can’t credibly say Company X’s emissions caused damage Y, which is why it’s not troubling itself with this necessary specificity.
The scheme doesn’t even hold the decision-makers from the “covered period” accountable; it is today’s company shareholders who are on the hook.
In the end, these companies’ customers, the everyday users of fossil fuel products, will bear the cost of the superfund in the form of higher prices on heating bills, at the gas pump, and on all the myriad goods to which oil and natural gas contribute.
The Climate Change Superfund is a carbon tax shorn of economic logic. At least a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system levied fair and square across an economy would give emitters an incentive to abate emissions.
That the state’s time-machine taxation targets only firms with a legal tie to New York sets an obvious and different incentive: to flee.
Fossil fuel companies, the alcoholic beverage industry, Big Tech, and anyone else in a line of business that might find itself afoul of the public mood now have reason to consider leaving the state.
The retroactive nature of the law will sow deep concern about the state’s commitment to the rule of law itself.
The practices in which so-called responsible parties engaged were entirely above board and they have not been found liable for any particular harm. In a very real sense, “cost recovery demand” is a euphemism for the expropriation of justly earned profit.
Russian oil firm Rosneft is another major petroleum producer that could also be hit at the bottom line by the new law.SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Though signed into law, what happens now with the superfund remains uncertain. On paper, Gov. Hochul is required to publish a report providing compliance guidance for companies before the end of April and companies are required to begin paying their bills next year. In practice, challenges in federal court are sure to draw out the process.
At issue is whether states like New York, Vermont, and Hawaii can impose liability on interstate and international greenhouse gas emissions or are preempted by the US Clean Air Act.
Regardless of what the courts say, though, New York has made it clear to businesses that the state isn’t worthy of trust. Meant to mitigate flood damage, the Climate Change Superfund will prompt an exodus.
Jordan McGillis (@jordanmcgillis) is the economics editor of City Journal.
